Teaching Silence
(as delivered at NYU’s 2020 Symposium, Revision and Reform: Teaching Writing Across Borders, via Zoom, on Oct. 23)
Don’t begin your essays “at the beginning of time,” we tell our students, but here I go:
When we first started to teach writing, we didn’t let laptops in the classroom. We made our students write, quietly, as we stood before them.
I miss the silence of their pens scratching on paper, but I chafed at the silence that inevitably came after I asked a question, everyone avoiding my eyes. Learning not to rush to fill in that silence was one of my biggest lessons in those days. I can still almost feel the strain of holding myself back as we shared the same oxygen, the same energy.
Now, we sit before our computers, our screens windows through which we commune. Here, there is another kind of difficult silence, those moments waiting for someone to unmute themselves--this awkwardness between our seemingly silent holograms, this silence that makes us wonder not only if and how we should fill it, but why it matters really, when we are so far away? When it only takes the click of a finger to--
Bodily, we are alone; I am in the front room of my apartment in Bushwick, the actual window beside me leading to the sidewalk, the street, that often distracts, nay entertains, me with its voices, motors, the occasional ambulance bringing me back to the pandemic’s early days when sirens echoed across the city and all we could do was listen.
How do we allow for multiple possibilities at once, we ask our students? We are here but we are also here. This is the kind of counterintuitive inkling we tell them to be on the lookout for. In class, they practice writing out problems like: if it’s true that silence is an absence of sound, why do we rush to fill it? How can we stop to recognize its fullness? How can we make it useful?
First, we must acknowledge commonly held notions of silence. In her essay, “Silence and the Notion of a Commons” Ursula Franklin denotes kinds of silence. She writes, “there is, of course, the silence imposed by fear or apprehension, its domain ranging from the ‘shut-up-or-else’ to the polite preference not to speak out.” I pause here to ask my students to write about the times they experienced this silence: being silent when you ought to have spoken up, being silenced, experiencing the silent treatment from someone you thought you loved, inflicting it yourself. You won’t have to share this, but please write. They are all muted, looking at me but not at me, and outside cars rush by.
Franklin goes on to describe a kind of silence to make space for and that is “the silence of contemplation; it is the silence in which people get in touch with themselves; it is the silence of meditation and worship. What makes this domain distinct is that silence is an enabling condition that opens up the possibility of unprogrammed, unplanned, and unprogrammable happenings.”
I want to tell her that it’s a real challenge to share this kind of silence when you are using a program, when you are made of pixels. I spend frantic days working to fill all the future silences that might come, by making for students videos, slideshows, typing out intricately worded directions.
In the evenings, my meditation group which had been meeting monthly and in person for many years has been meeting weekly over Zoom. We sit quietly, our eyes closed, facing each other, facing our screens, for 20 minutes, half an hour at a time. And then, carefully, we talk.
Though my students and I don’t meditate, we have our rituals, in one of them we slowly read aloud about and contemplate the metaphysics of communication. In “Hope is an Embrace of the Unknown,” Rebecca Solnit tells us that: that power comes from the shadows and the margins,” the quiet places. In “Telling is Listening,” another Ursula, science fiction luminary, Ursula K. Le Guin speaks to us from the grave, she says: “Without silence, pauses, rests, there is no rhythm. Only noise. Significance is born of the rhythmic alternation of void and event—pause and act—silence and word.” It is in this back and forth that we are bonded, LeGuin says, “by the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.” It is by sharing this longing with our students that we teach them to make the space to think, to write, alone, in silence.
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Works Cited:
Franklin, Ursula. “Silence and the Notion of a Commons.” The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacificism as a Map. Between the Lines, 2006, p. 157-164.
LeGuin, Ursula. “Telling is Listening.” The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambhala, 2004.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Hope is an Embrace of the Unknown.” The Guardian, 5 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-new-essay-embrace-unknown.
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Ideas/Works Referenced:
Gu, Yifan. “The Listen is to Bind.” Mercer Street, 2020-2021. https://wp.nyu.edu/mercerstreet/2020-2021/to-listen-is-to-bind/.
“As a reader, it would be better for me to just get closer to the text and observe and feel directly.”
“After all, to speak is to blunder. But to listen, is to bind.”
Chang, Ted. “The Great Silence.” e-Flux Journal, 8 May 2015. http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/.
“The Fermi paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe out to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it’s disconcerting quiet. / Hundreds of years ago, my kind was so plentiful that the Rio Abajo forest resounded with our voices. Now we’re almost gone. Soon this rainforest may be as silent as the rest of the universe.”
Childhood Memory
When I was much younger than our students, way before the beginning, one of my favorite things to do was swim to the bottom of the deep end, and listen to the tinkle of the quiet. Why does this remain one of my strongest desires? (Are childhood anecdotes useful as evidence? We often wonder with our students.)
Krishnamurti, Jiddu. On Love and Loneliness. HarperOne, 2013.
“Very few go beyond the extraordinary fear of loneliness; but one must go beyond it, because beyond it lies the real treasure of aloneness...aloneness is something entirely different; it is a state of freedom which comes into being when you have gone through loneliness and understand it. [It is] only then that the mind is completely alone, and only such a mind is creative.”
Quaker Meetings
Shanghai’s electronic voices
I spent the Spring 2019 semester teaching writing in Shanghai. Alone, in a foreign place, things felt loud. There were electronic voices everywhere. I remember them especially in the dairy aisle of the supermarket, these tiny little speakers mounted on the shelves, yelling at me indecipherably in a language I was only just barely beginning to decipher.
World population growth between 1980 and 2020
In 1980, there were 4.5 billion people on earth, and in 2020, there are nearly 8 billion. [link] In 1980, the Internet was only an inkling, and in 2020, it is what most of us live, breathe and dream. (Statistics are a kind of evidence we seem to think we trust the most, but it is our duty as researchers, as writers, to think carefully about where they come from, how we interpret them, we say.) Since we were born, there has practically been a doubling in the number of mouths and ears here and an amplification of many of those voices.
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Something I regret I missed/forgot:
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.